While international cooperation research emphasizes institutional design, states mostly interact with existing organizations. How do states choose organizations for cooperation? We develop a theory of agency choice for development projects, emphasizing the importance of domestic institutions,...

While neoliberal institutionalists argue that treaties facilitate collective action, many North-South regulatory treaties focus on largely national problems in developing countries. As such, these treaties present a puzzle: why a global treaty to address national regulatory problems? We argue...

To mitigate climate change, states must make significant investments into energy and other sectors. To solve this problem, scholars emphasize the importance of leveraging private capital. If states create institutional mechanisms that promote private investment, they can reduce the fiscal cost...

Previous research has shown that international trade exposure promotes the diffusion of voluntary environmental standards, such as ISO 14001, from importing nations to exporting nations. However, previous studies have not theorized about the conditions under which trade diffusion is most...

States often create international institutions that impose legally binding rules on member states, and then do not even attempt to enforce these rules. Why? In this article, we present a game-theoretic model of moribund hard law in international institutions. We show that if some states face...